Editorial

Educational Video Sites

RefSeek’s guide to the 25 best online resources for finding free educational videos. With the exception of BrainPOP and Cosmeo, all listed sites offer their extensive video libraries for free and without registration.

Academic EarthThousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars.academicearth.org

Big ThinkVideo interviews with 600+ thought leaders in a range of fields.bigthink.com

Think twice before you throw away those leftovers. This infographic illustrates how wasted food has an impact that ripples across the environment.

We wrote last week about our giant food waste problem. Here’s more fuel for the fire: an infographic from U.K. food industry magazine Next Generation Food that illustrates the environmental impact of wasted food.

97% owned present serious research and verifiable evidence on our economic and financial system. This is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective and explains the inner workings of Central Banks and the Money creation process.

When money drives almost all activity on the planet, it’s essential that we understand it. Yet simple questions often get overlooked, questions like; where does money come from? Who creates it? Who decides how it gets used? And what does this mean for the millions of ordinary people who suffer when the monetary, and financial system, breaks down?

Produced by Queuepolitely and featuring Ben Dyson of Positive Money, Josh Ryan-Collins of The New Economics Foundation, Ann Pettifor, the “HBOS Whistleblower” Paul Moore, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Nick Dearden from the Jubliee Debt Campaign.

Review: Excellent description of the problems with and solutions to the current financial system…

“The issue of monetary reform has historically been a very sensitive issue, because of the incredible power, wealth and privileges it bestows. In an age where analytical thought and a scientific approach are held in such high esteem, there is no justifiable argument for keeping the mechanisms and implications of the monetary process such a taboo subject.

As democratic citizens we have the right to demand a monetary system which is both stable and beneficial to society…”

Learn how the global financial institutions are just like terrorists, holding the public hostage with threats of economic collapse – how they’re bailed out at the expense of the infrastructures we need to live as we’re told that they are simply too big to fail.

This film describes how the banks can fail, and we can all have the financial security we need to confidently take out loans, buy houses and live freer, happier lives, neither as slaves to the banks or restrained by the fear of losing everything.

Political philosopher John Gray, commented, “We’re not moving to a world in which crises will never happen or will happen less and less. We are in a world in which they happen several times during a given human lifetime and I think that will continue to be the case”If you have decided that crisis as a result of the monetary system is not an event you want to keep revisiting in your life-time then this documentary will equip you with the knowledge you need, what you do with it is up to you.

If you have a problem and need a solution for it, chances are high that a JavaScript library or jQuery plugin exists that was created to solve this very problem. Such libraries are always great to have in your bookmarks or in your local folders, especially if you aren’t a big fan of cross-browser debugging.

A JavaScript library isn’t always the best solution: it should never be a single point of failure for any website, and neither should a website rely on JavaScript making the content potentially inaccessible. Progressive enhancement is our friend; sometimes JavaScript won’t load properly, or won’t be supported — e.g. users of mobile devices might run into latency issues or performance issues with some JavaScript-libraries. Often large all-around JavaScript libraries such as jQuery might be an overkill, while tiny JavaScript micro-libraries could serve as good, “light” alternatives for a particular problem. We’ll present some of them today.

In this two-part overview, we feature some of the most useful JavaScript and jQuery libraries which could be just the right solutions for your common problems. You might know some of these libraries, but you probably don’t know all of them. In either case, we hope that this overview will help you find or rediscover some tools that you could use in your next projects.

This Blog of mine is without any ads! I think it’s fun to run this site, and part of me is proud it is not for making money. But it’s not fully by choice. Years ago I went experimenting with Google Adsense. This experimenting soon got me banned as I sometimes clicked my own ads?! Stupid!After maybe a year I tried without any success to get Google to unban me. Recently I tried it again, but still no success!

So, if you are new to adsense or maybe you are about to get started, READ this guide! I know I should have done.

Want to make money with Google AdSense for content? Here’s a list of what not to do, unless you want to get banned. Google doesn’t play around when it comes to click fraud. Click fraud loses Google money, and it loses AdWordscustomers money.

If you don’t play by the rules, you may get a warning, you may get suspended, or you may just get banned.

This article is seriously long, but you’re sure to get your money’s worth. I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

The following post is by Arley McBlain. Arley has written a fewother great articles for CSS-Tricks in the past so I’m pleased to have him back for another!

This post’s title isn’t just a weak attempt at SEO stuffing, it’s also a blind-folded scissor kick into a beehive convention! Few topics in web production can bring a nerd’s blood to a rolling boil as quickly as “The Fold” and “Responsive Web Design”, so it’s high time we combine the two and bring this server to its knees under the sheer weight of trolls sharing how they really feel about me as a person.